董事会性别多元化、管理者权力与审计需求

Board Gender Diversity,Managerial Power and Demand for External Audit

利用我国上市公司的会计数据和公司治理数据,以审计费用和国内十大以及国际四大等度量高质量外部审计需求,以董事会中至少存在一名女性董事和董事会中女性董事比率度量董事会性别多元化,实证考察了我国上市公司董事会性别多元化和管理者权力对高质量外部审计需求的影响。实证研究发现,董事会性别多元化有助于促进上市公司产生高质量的外部审计需求;然而,进一步的实证结果显示,董事会性别多元化对高质量外部审计需求的促进作用仅仅局限于管理者权力较弱的治理环境,而当管理者权力较强时,董事会性别多元化对高质量外部审计需求的促进效应完全弱化。这可能源于当前我国上市公司董事会性别多元化程度较低,当管理者权力较强时,女性董事还难以发挥其对管理者的监督作用。

According to the theoretical and empirical research, the board of directors is one of the most important mechanisms that control and supervise the managerial opportunism behavior, and the effective board monitoring can help to restrain the financially fraudu- lent behavior. However, the effectiveness of corporate governance, especially board monitoring, attracted the attention of government and academic scholars in the wake of the corporate accounting scandals such as Enron and WorldCom. From the perspective of the high quality of external auditing demand, this paper investigates the impact of board gender diversity on the effectiveness of board governance. We empirically examines the impacts of board gender diversity and managerial power on the demand for external audit, using the data from the Chinese listed companies during the periods 2002-2006. We use audit fee.Big Ten and Big Four as measures for higher quality of audit demand, and board with at least one female director and proportion of female directors on the boardroom as measures for board gender diversity. After controlling for other known board, firm and industry characteristics, we find that board gender diversity is associated with higher demand for external audit, this indicates that gender diversity in board of directors can help to improve the quality of external audit; however, the positive effect of board gender diversity on demand for external audit exists only when managerial power is lower. These results indicate that it is difficult for female directors to monitor the managers when managerial power is high due to the low degree of board gender diversity in Chinese listed companies. Our paper contributes to the growing literature that provides evidence on the linkage between board monitoring mechanisms and financial reporting and audit processes. More specifically, it extends the literature on the relationship between board characteristics and audit process. Further, this paper adds to the audit quality literature by showing that managerial power is of significant effect on the relationship between board characteristics and audit quality.